Edutopia

While it feels like we just wrote 7 Apps for Teaching Children Coding Skills, it's been a year, and as we know, that’s a couple of lifetimes in the technology world! Over the past year, we've discovered even more fabulous sites for teaching coding. With programs like the Hour of Code and other sites, it looks like many children have been exposed to computer programming, but we feel that we still have a long way to go. Graduates with programming skills are in high demand, and it's clear those numbers will only increase. In addition, the skills acquired through programming, like logical thinking, problem solving, persistence, collaboration, and communication, can be applied to any grade level, any subject area, and in every part of life. Programming isn't just limited to computer science majors in college. Hopscotch Platform: iPadCost: freeHopscotch is still a favorite for us. ScratchJr Platform: iPadCost: freeScratch remains a free go-to online app, and now there's ScratchJr! Kodable

CodeSpells: Express Yourself With Magic by ThoughtSTEMWhen we were young, wizards like Gandalf and Dumbledore struck a chord in our minds. We spent hours pretending to be wizards and casting epic imaginary spells. Now, we want to bring that kind of creative freedom to video games. Instead of giving the player pre-packaged spells, CodeSpells allows you to craft your own magical spells. It's the ultimate spellcrafting sandbox. What makes it all possible is code.

Teach Your Kids to Code: 6 Beginner's Resources for ParentsIntroducing computer programming to your kids can be a challenge, especially for those who aren’t familiar with the nuances of code. Fortunately, in the last few years, a number of apps, software, and guides have been produced that make the often-complex subject of computer coding easy to grasp for young learners. So where to begin? These are a few resources that parents can share with their kids to help them start learning about programming.

Design an App! A Digital Technologies Project for 4/5/6In this ICT activity, students create their own app. The project is accessed through a Weebly. It is open-ended and caters for the diversity of all students. It is student-paced, allowing students to work through it at their own speed. Upon completion of the project, students present their new app to the class.Code Monster from Crunchzilla<h2>Code Monster gets kids excited about programming. It is a combination of a game and tutorial where kids experiment with learning to code. <p> Code Monster use Javascript. Please enable Javascript if you want the play with the Code Monster. Otherwise, Code Monster will not be able to play with you. </p><p></h2>

Alice.orgUsing an innovative programming environment to support the creation of 3D animations, the Alice Project provides tools and materials for teaching and learning computational thinking, problem solving, and computer programming across a spectrum of ages and grade levels. Read more... Alice at ISTE Conference & Expo Alice is in Philadelphia this week at the ISTE Conference and Expo. We are in booth area 2228, with Professor Garfield and company.

Awesome Websites to Get Your Kids Hooked on Programming - TheITBrosThe success stories of people who used MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) to pick up new skills and even change careers aren’t exactly rare nowadays. You probably have heard of people learning how to code by signing up for classes on sites like Coursera, eDX, and Udacity, then leveraging the knowledge that they’ve gained to find jobs and/or internships. But what if your ten-year old kid expresses an interest in becoming a computer programmer?Technologies: General capabilities - The Australian Curriculum v7.3General capabilities In the Australian Curriculum, the general capabilities encompass the knowledge, skills, behaviours and dispositions that, together with curriculum content in each learning area and the cross-curriculum priorities, will assist students to live and work successfully in the twenty-first century. There are seven general capabilities: Literacy Numeracy Information and communication technology (ICT) capability Critical and creative thinking Personal and social capability Ethical understanding Intercultural understanding. In the Australian Curriculum: Technologies, general capabilities are identified wherever they are developed or applied in content descriptions.

MIT App InventorGet Started Follow these simple steps to build your first app. Tutorials Step-by-step guides show you how to build all kinds of apps.Quest - Write text adventure games and interactive storiesQuest lets you make interactive story games. Text adventure games like Zork and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Gamebooks like the Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy books. You don't need to know how to program.Clearing the Confusion between Technology Rich and Innovative Poor: Six Questions** We are seeking global opinions, please consider commenting with your thoughts and ideas of the definition of innovation** In a recent webinar, more than 90% of school leaders responded that they were leading an innovative school as a result of the implementation of technology. At the end of the webinar, when polled again, only one leader claimed to be leading an innovative school. The complete reversal was due to a presentation of the Six Questions that you will read about in this article. This list of questions was developed to help educators be clear about the unique added value of a digital learning environment.

Teaching Kids to CodeEvery era demands--and rewards--different skills. In different times and different places, we have taught our children to grow vegetables, build a house, forge a sword or blow a delicate glass, bake bread, create a soufflé, write a story or shoot hoops. Now we are teaching them to code. We are teaching them to code, however, not so much as an end in itself but because our world has morphed: so many of the things we once did with elements such as fire and iron, or tools such as pencil and paper, are now wrought in code. We are teaching coding to help our kids craft their future.

Welcome, Inventors!Follow these four short videos and you'll have three working apps to show for it! After building the starter apps, which will take around an hour, you can move on to extending them with more functionality, or you can start building apps of your own design. Get started now with Video 1 below. Trouble with the Text-To-Speech player on your phone? Get help here. What's Next?

Rock Skipper Frog: Communication by SemaphoreMost male frogs protect their territory and advertize their willingness to mate by vocalizing. But what do you do when background noise is so loud that it can drown out your calls? You can resort to semaphore, like this rock skipper frog: This video was filmed by University of Vienna students Doris Preininger and Markus Boeckle, who participated in a study in this behaviour which was released in 2009. The abstract:Teaching kids how to write computer programs, by Marshall Brainby Marshall Brain Let's say that you have children, and you would like to help them learn computer programming at a youngish age. As the father of four kids, I have tried to approach it from several different angles. What I would like to do here is collect some ideas for parents who are looking for different options.